The three essays of this dissertation contribute to the measurement of European economic integration and investigate the welfare effects of the European countries. The first study presents a newly developed index – the EU Index – which measures the extent of economic integration into the...

The standard panel data literature is moving from micro panels, where the cross-section dimension is large and the intertemporal sample size is small, to large panels, where both, the cross-section and the time dimension, are large. This thesis contributes to this new and growing area of panel...

"'Big data' is now readily available to economic historians, thanks to the digitisation of primary sources, collaborative research linking different data sets, and the publication of databases on the internet. Key economic indicators, such as the consumer price index, can be tracked over long...